by Ann Beattie
The meeting took place at Frank’s office. Joe Fox went alone, and apparently left the meeting less heavyhearted than he’d been. Frank gave me only a quick description of the meeting, assuring me that what Patty had was treatable, agreeing with his colleague that the special camp might help to turn things around. He said it was run by a doctor whose daughter had the same problem as Patty.
And then I forgot about the Foxes. Life intervened. In spite of my children’s dismissal of me as an inadequate mother, I kept the house clean. Months passed, and summer vacation began, and had I thought of her at all, I would have remembered that Patty had gone to camp. I was in school, myself, taking a course in nursing. I was surprised when Helen Fox called and said she had to see me immediately. My first thought was that Patty had died. Why else would she becalling in such a hushed voice? Why else would Helen be choking back tears? I asked her over immediately. My children would have it that no one ever entered our house, but Helen came to the house many times. Though she didn’t accept my invitation, that time. She asked me to come to her house. I was busy—I would have preferred otherwise, but she sounded so distraught that I agreed. Braced with a drink of whiskey—with onlyonedrink of whiskey—I drove to the Foxes’ house.
We sat on cushions placed inside the bay windows. She had made no effort to clean up. Plates and food containers, cans and dirty napkins, were everywhere. She held the baby, who was suffering from a cold. She bounced him nervously, wiping away tears with her elbow. “What can be so bad?” I said. “Tell me what can be so bad.”
“I’m so afraid you’ll never speak to me again,” she said.
“Tell me and let’s find out,” I said.
“There’s no way to say it but to say it,” she said. The baby twisted in her arms; her eyes were bright with tears. “He sent a bill we can’t possibly pay,” she said.
I was thinking so slowly, I asked who she was talking about.
“The doctor,” she said. “Your husband.”
Frank had sent my friend a bill? I had not really thought of Helen Fox as my friend until that moment. An acquaintance, yes—but really, shewasa friend. I was embarrassed, since Frank knew their circumstances, that he had billed them. But perhaps I did not know how these things went. I could hear Frank, dripping with sarcasm, saying just that to me: that I knew nothing about how the world operated.
“I’ll speak to him,” I said. Somehow, I sensed that Helen was not just upset about the bill.
“Joe phoned him, and he was quite abusive,” she said. “And then Joe and I had a big fight, because . . . well: because the meeting had been my idea.”
“There’s been a misunderstanding,” I said. “I’ll speak to him tonight.”
“And then he called me,” she said. “I know you’re never going to like me again, but I like you, so I’m going to say something I never believed I could say.”
“Frank called you?” I said.
She nodded yes.
“What did he say?”
“He made it clear that if he and I got together, there would be no question of any bill.”
It was stunning news. The minute she said it, I knew she was telling the truth. I had no idea he would stoop so low. Really, I found him as contemptible as she did, but I was so humiliated, I couldn’t speak.
“Joe will find a way to pay the bill,” she said. She was almost whispering. “But I thought you should know,” she finished.
The baby had remained quiet until the discussion was over. Then, immediately, he began to wail. She stood quickly, jiggling him against her chest, and almost ran from the room.
She never returned. Of course she was only upstairs, too miserable to come down, but I could not make myself walk up the steps to comfort her. What little anger I felt toward her was irrational, I knew. For a few seconds I indulgedmyself, but I was not able to convince myself that she shared the blame.
She had done one thing to prepare for my visit: there was coffee percolating—the smell attracted me, bringing me out of my reverie—so I went to her cupboard and took down a teacup and saucer. I poured a cup, imagining myself pouring two, carrying one upstairs. I knew she took milk in her coffee. Milk only, no sugar. I took both, but the effort seemed too great. I sat there with my cup of black coffee, drinking liquid that tasted as bitter as I felt. She was upstairs. It was my obligation—it was what any decent person would have done—to go up to her.
I sat at the table. If Helen Fox, who else? Anyone and everyone?
Eventually I made myself go home. It was almost three, and I did not want to encounter her children, returning from school. Neither did I want to see my own children, because they were all that anchored me to—as Helen called him—“the doctor.”
He could not really have desired her. He had only done it to disgrace me.
I drove home shakily. In the driveway, I turned on the car radio. I had driven in silence all the way home, but I felt that I could not get out of the car without hearing some music. Anything would have done: the news, as well as a song. A song was being sung, but I could not concentrate on the lyrics. It just added chaos to my thoughts. I turned off the ignition and went inside, and there was Andrew, sitting at the kitchen table. It was five minutes after three.
“What are you doing back so early?” I said.
“I got sent home. I have a fever,” he said.
I felt his head. “I’m calling the doctor,” I said. Andrew’s pediatrician was Frank’s colleague, Davis Strumm. Instead, I dialed Frank’s number. I handed the phone to Andrew. “I’ve called your father,” I said. “Tell his nurse what you just told me.” He tried to give me the phone back. Why did he always hesitate? I looked at his outstretched hand. His head had been burning. “Andrew is sick!” I screamed from where I stood behind him, so loud that Frank’s nurse, Frank’s whore, must certainly have heard me. Andrew pushed back the chair, clambering to get away. The phone fell to the floor. I picked up the receiver: “You tell Frank to come right home, that his son is ill,” I said. My voice was trembling so much I could hardly get the words out. I hung up on her. I went to the cupboard and took out the scotch and drank straight from the bottle. “What are you doing? Mom? What are you doing?” Andrew said. He had returned to the doorway. I had made him cry. I began to cry, seeing how much I had upset him. “Stop it, Mom, stop it,” he said. “What are youdoing?”
Did she fail to give him the message? Or was he not there—had there been some emergency at the hospital? More likely, he was also two-timing her. Frank came home at the usual time, and pretended to be shocked when he found Andrew with a washcloth on his head, almost delirious on the living room couch. He thought what Andrew was saying to him—because sick as he was, Andrew immediately began apologizing for my hysteria—was delusional. But I told him. I told him why I’d gotten drunk in the first place. Frank and I had a bitter, bitter exchange. And where was Nina? Nina, who was always mutely off in some corner, watching. Foronce she was not welded to Andrew’s side, but had gone off with a girlfriend. Some mother I had never heard of called to say that she had taken her daughter and mine ice-skating.
He didn’t even try to tell me that Helen Fox had misunderstood. That night, in my room, he begged forgiveness. He said he had always been attracted to loose women. Wasn’t that just perfect? He didn’t even realize how insulting such a confession was. I felt I must defend Helen. I was angry that not only had Frank propositioned her, but that he had misunderstood who she was. I couldn’t have known, that night, that Andrew was going to become so smitten with Patty. To tell the truth, while I knew Helen Fox had done a fine job raising her children, and while Andrew knew better than to do anything that could get him in trouble, with Patty or with any other girl, I was not comfortable with the idea of his seeing so much of Helen’s daughter. Looking back, I see I was just plain jealous, because after the incident, I was too embarrassed to continue my friendship with Helen. When my son began to spend more and more time at their house, it put me on the spot. It was as thoug
h my friendship with Helen was continuing vicariously, through the children. I should have screwed up my courage and called Helen. I’m sure her standoffishness was just embarrassment over having to tell me about Frank. But instead, I let Andrew be my ambassador: my little gentleman, courting her nice daughter. Nina, I think, was quite thrown by Andrew’s defection. Finally, their age difference did begin to result in their going their separate ways. But she would not discuss it with me. She would not discuss it with anyone, apparently, following Andrew’s lead, because being the shy and private boy he was, Andrewwanted to keep his infatuation secret. Ashamed to be smitten, like any other young man. So much for Frank’s ideas about our homosexual son.
Wouldn’t it just figure that Frank would think a man with any sensitivity was homosexual. But for a moment, when he first said that to me, he did manage to plant the seed of doubt. People didn’t even speak of such things as a distressing possibility back then. People—leaving aside Frank—said nothing at all.
Oh, he had sex with Patty, I suppose. In all that time, he must have. Helen knew it, too. Eventually we ran into each other in the grocery store, and she could hardly look at me, and I could hardly look at her. We were as inept as adolescents. I still have no idea what she thought she had to feel embarrassed about, since my son was the one who had gone courting. Girls had no ability to attract boys in those days. They do now, but they didn’t, then. A boy either took to you, or he didn’t. Here I thought she was going to be Nina’s friend, but Nina never did make friends easily. She was probably glad Andrew lifted the burden. In the grocery store, Helen grabbed the bar of her shopping cart tightly. There was that baby, with its perpetual cold, sitting in the seat, the baby just as still as his mother. To avoid a discussion, I talked to the baby for a few seconds. I patted his soft hair. Helen blurted out that history was not going to repeat itself. She said that I had nothing to fear. It was the strangest conversation, if you could even call it that. I remember that a can toppled from a shelf and that she nearly jumped out of her skin. I suppose I might have taken offense at what she was implying about my son, but after all, I knew what she was alludingto. It was good Patty knew what to do. Frank had assured me that he had spoken to Andrew when he was five years old, and six years old, and on every birthday thereafter until Andrew finally asked him to please stop, because he had gotten the message long ago. So if both of them were using protection, so much the better. But there I stood with Helen, who used to be my friend, half-embarrassed and half-grateful that at least she felt she could speak honestly with me. I was not such a prudish person. I heard her out and then she simply started past me with her cart. I had to say something, but I couldn’t think what. She looked at the floor for a few seconds, no doubt hoping the baby would make a fuss. The baby was just sitting there, watching—another version of Nina. It was so unnerving. The whole setting, the unexpectedness of it, her strangeness made for one of those awkward moments, but I had no idea how awkward, until she spoke. She said: “Have you been drinking? I know you drink.” What was she talking about? I had not even had a cup of coffee yet that day. I thought to myself: Who isshe, to say such a thing? In that moment, I saw her through Frank’s eyes. “Youshould talk!” I said. Her hair was disheveled; she was wearing high heels, in the grocery store. She was the one who thought it was perfectly all right for two teenagers to have sex. She wasn’t just looking the other way, she was condoning it. I made my voice low—though my inclination was otherwise, I had not been drinking and I was quite aware that we were in a public place—and I warned her to stay away from my husband. None of it was what I wanted to say. I wanted to ask her to come to my house for coffee. I wanted to ask her if she thought that what was happening between Andrew andPatty was really love, and if so, whether we shouldn’t be happy. I wanted to give her a hug and ask her to put the past behind us, but what she had said insulted me. Then she was hurrying away—running in her cheap high heels, pushing the cart with her sniveling baby sitting inside. When we crossed paths after that, we both pretended not to see each other. I gave myself credit for not involving Andrew in the problem. That encounter stayed a private matter.
I am a person entirely able to keep a confidence. That is not a thing you will find often in this world. It’s rare to meet a person who does not eventually, if not immediately, share a secret with at least one other. Being a reliable person is a real virtue. If anything Helen Fox had told me had been said in confidence, it would have stayed with me, alone. I always felt that she did want to say something. That she and I were kindred spirits, which made her nasty, inaccurate judgment of me even harder to take—though who can account for the things people come up with when they feel the need to justify their own actions? Oftentimes, people tell you a secret because they wish you would repeat it.
I think Frank confessed his transgressions so he could be more at peace with himself. I never went to the children, saying, Oh, is it true he did thus and such? People need to take care of things among themselves, and if you rush to intervene, you are usually the one who catches the flak, while the people at each other’s throats kiss and make up. I think the children became stronger and learned strategies to adjust to Frank’s mood swings better because I neither condoned his actions nor pretended they didn’t happen. Those times either of the children did report some unkindness of Frank’s—it happenedwhen they were quite young, more with Andrew than with Nina—I would explain that they must find a way to work out the problem directly with their father. You wouldn’t have so many people suing each other today if that notion had been instilled in them as children. Andrew and his father did work things out. The truth is, they just had very different personalities. And while I would never speak directly against Frank—well, they knew about the other women; sometimes that was just too much for me to bear—I let him know Frank’s lack of loyalty hurt me, though I tried to explain to Andrew that his father was not a simple man, and that there were more complexities—more good qualities—than were apparent. There were those letters he wrote me—I think Andrew was pleased to learn that his father had such a romantic streak. Without them, I would not have had much evidence of his affection, because Frank was not one to be publicly demonstrative. It was a different time then, of course. Physical passion was not enacted by decent people outside the bedroom. Then Elvis Presley arrived on the scene, with his sexual pantomime, to open the bedroom door forever. Pretty soon musicians were mimicking sex acts with their guitars and the climax of their songs became a crescendo of destruction.
I might have tried harder with Nina, though something in her eyes told me she wasn’t likely to be persuaded. She didn’t like Frank—such a sad situation for both of them—and certainly she didn’t need her father the way she might have, had Andrew not taken his place. But then you consider Nina as an adult: she went right out and married a doctor, herself. There’s Dr. Freud: noticing how people unconsciously repeat the past. Except that of course she thought she was improving on thepast: she intended her marriage to be perfect. What would have happened if Mac had lived? He was a nice enough man. A little remote. Not much of a sense of humor.
The time the two of them came calling—the time Andrew and Mac came to take me to lunch—could have been such a happy occasion, if only she’d joined them. But of course she didn’t know; they were doing it behind her back, so how could she have come? Mac had some idea about reconciling me with Nina. Frank had died the year before, and for years—for all her childhood, as well as when she was an adult—Nina had been lost to me. Some mothers might have been angry with their son for taking their daughter away from them, but I wasn’t that irrational. She had attached herself to him like glue, not vice versa. So there he was, unglued—a little pun! It’s always good luck to make an unintentional pun—there he was, looking so sheepish, with Nina’s husband-to-be at his side, and Mac with a bunch of flowers. A gesture Frank never made, but it was such a conventional gesture; I’d hoped Nina’s intended would be a little more original. My mother used to say:Never
look a gift horse in the mouth, but really: a bunch of chrysanthemums? I was sure that the bride’s nosegay would be filled with dainty roses and baby’s breath, but there I stood, receiving my spidery chrysanthemums from Mac. Their smell was downright unpleasant; no way to sniff them and truly offer thanks, so I just took them. But do you know, he wanted me to put them in water immediately. He was so proud of his flowers. As proud as a child bringing home his drawings—which at least Andrew did. Before he started impressing his sister by casually discarding them.
Mac asked for a vase and for room-temperature water. Room temperature! He wanted the water to be as neutral as his flowers! He even asked for scissors to cut the stems. I looked at Andrew, to see what he made of it, but he was as good as his sister at not showing any reaction. I suppose I showed my irritation, my disappointment, too clearly. Like his father, Andrew would never acknowledge certain of my feelings. He acknowledged them those times he thought them appropriate, but dismissed them, otherwise. What was I supposed to do? Dovetail my feelings to theirs? Yes. That was what I was supposed to do, because I was secondary. They were both of supreme importance to themselves, and I was silly and temperamental: worse than that, they would claim I was a drunken woman, which meant that I was a person who wouldn’t conform well enough to what they wanted. Well: as a mature woman, and one who had had not one sip of alcohol prior to their arrival, I wasn’t going to ooh and aah about cheap flowers. Those chrysanthemums were silly, not me. People take such pride in the magnificence of their gesture, though even when the gesture is the right one, it’s so often made by the wrong person. If Frank had courted me with flowers, that might have been nice, but when it was my future son-in-law, it was clear that he thought I was some old lady who’d be easy to impress.
What did he have that should be so impressive? I wasn’t much impressed that he was going to be a doctor, that was for sure. Did he count on winning me over because he was tall and nice-looking? I’d found out by then—as everyone eventually does—how little appearances matter. Did he think I’d be impressed that he might be willing to hear my side of the story?